


A Sad Little Kiwi Who Paints Without Feeling

by hocotate



Series: Flashfics/drabbles [22]
Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Angst, Flash Fic, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Romance, layhan - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 19:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11607336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hocotate/pseuds/hocotate
Summary: Yixing is a suffering artist who paints alone in his studio in Beijing, and Luhan– well, Luhan just walks in.





	A Sad Little Kiwi Who Paints Without Feeling

He was a suffering artist who painted alone in some small, messy studio flat in Beijing, and he had gone eighty-six days now without selling a piece.  
  
“Zhang Yixing!” he shouted one day, decked out in crimson coloured gouache from head to toe. “Zhang Yixing you stupid idiot!”  
  
A splashing sound followed and his lungs tasted paint, a strange mixture of eggshell and resin competing with the sound of glockenspiel and cor anglais. The radio was on—it was playing Mahler—and Yixing dragged his tongue across the canvas.  
  
“Your work tastes like ashes and acrylics,” he murmured to himself with a bitter tone of voice, a few eyelashes staying glued to his painting after several vertebrae cracked as he straightened. “Imported talent, nothing but fake.”  
  
The epic symphony eventually waved goodbye with a slow, poignant pianissimo fading into absolute silence and Yixing took the expected intermission as an invite to leap from his work chair and stretch another tendon. Climbing on top of the highest bookshelf, he squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath whilst for a moment pretending that his blue, sticky arms weren’t actually arms but something much better. There, with his wings spread wide but useless, he let his lips form a semblance of a lopsided pout.  
  
”You’re a bird,” he whispered, as crazy as he was, “a huge, clumsy, useless kiwi.”  
  
The familiar distance was as disappointing as ever and as he hit the floor with a thump, a Brahmsian string quartet replaced the previous harmony of sonatas.  
  
“Useless,” he sighed as though the wooden boards hadn't heard that before, “absolutely useless and you deserve to suffer.”  
  
Cold, whipping rain was what usually offered him some debatable comfort in the sultry inferno that was downtown madness. Today was sunny, though, just like yesterday and before, and it didn’t seem like the sun would ever die. Money was a scarcity, inspiration was dead, his overpriced brushes stiff and shedding and in desperate need of permanent changing; everything sucked and that was the end of it.  
  
Then, someone walked through the door.  
  
“Still a penguin, are you?” Luhan asked with a chuckle yet without any sense of humour whatsoever. He had seen his friend slumped down before, had dragged him to the hospital many times over. To spot Yixing there all covered in some substance which his uncultured self couldn’t even guess the proper name for wasn’t that surprising given that summer wasn’t over yet.  
  
“Kiwi, Lu, but now I’m human.” Yixing stared up at the ceiling and groaned, “The most useless of all, a shame to all of mankind. Never call me an ambulance again!”  
  
“I have a thing for broke artists, though,” Luhan said as he swept his own shoulder free of dust and dried oil paint. “So don't break your neck before I've taken advantage of that very last drop of misery altogether.”  
  
The air stayed hot and humid throughout the day as one miserable artist got pulled up by a friend to whom inherent anguish and self-chosen squalor was but another part of some elaborated playhouse act. It never really mattered that they were all too different, not as long as they kept playing together night after night until the sun stopped rising and the lack of light brought with it that anticipated rain.  
  
“Paint must taste nicer when licked straight from the canvas,” was with which Luhan taunted after pulling out one morning, his sedate whispers summoning dolour to return after hours and hours of ragged gasping.  
  
Yixing didn’t laugh, though, as his wings still hurt.  
  
“It isn’t the paint, Lu,” he let out with a sigh. ”It’s never the paint. It’s me who’s gross.”  
  
Arms enveloped him in warmth then like always, his friend—or lover, dealer and whatnot—reaching out to bring him down safely in spite of knowing that his feet never touched ground.  
  
“Not to me, you’re not,” were the words having been uttered sincerely on so many mornings before, that sober promise bound to be repeated again and again a thousand times over.

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually just word vomit, but I do wanna turn it into a longer oneshot at some point.


End file.
